Nanny State

Since I wrote my piece detailing how “progressive activist” and Obama tool Sally Kohn lectured millions of Americans who have lost their health insurance plans as a result of Obamacare that it was a “good thing” that was happening, I’ve noticed a similar theme/excuse-making from other liberals on the same issue. As a refresher, here’s a snippet from Kohn’s piece (bolded emphasis added by me):

(CNN) – Conservatives are expressing shock and outrage that the Obama administration knew that many people in the individual insurance market would not be able to keep their plans once the Affordable Care Act took effect. Such shock is not surprising; overblown outrage is the stock and trade of conservative politics these days.

But here’s what conservatives won’t tell you, lest it undermine their theatrics: Many insurance plans are shutting down because they don’t meet the higher bar of quality benefits required under Obamacare, and of those people who lose access to their plans, many will pay less and all will have better and more comprehensive options.

Also, with a few exceptions, no one is really noting that this point isn’t quite news. In 2010, the fact that certain insurance plans would not be grandfathered into Obamacare because of their inadequate coveragewas widely coveredby the press. It was a given, after all that, if standards for health insurance were going to be raised in America — a good thing — then some plans that don’t meet the bar would no longer be available. One could blame this on the Affordable Care Act, or alternatively, one could blame this on insurance companies for providing such substandard care in the first place.

Here’s what this boils down to:

Will some people lose their current insurance? Yes.

Will these same folks lose health insurance coverage? No.

They will all have access to better plans and in many cases pay less because of expanded options and tax credits.

Kohn is basically saying, “Yeah, so you’re losing your insurance plan (that you may have liked) but the new one will be a ‘better’ (even if more expensive and out of your price range) because that’s how President Obama wanted it to be. So just deal with it, stupid, and you might see the benefits of it eventually.” She’s not the only one. Dylan Scott at Talking Points Memo wrote this ode to fascism today:

What Really Happens To People Whose Insurance Is ‘Canceled’ Because Of Obamacare

[…]

What really matters is what happens to the people who are receiving those cancelation letters that congressional Republicans have been parading in front of the cameras?

The bottom line: Almost all of them are going to receive the same or much better coverage, and many of them are going to receive financial help to purchase it.

First, let’s put the issue in perspective. As Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor who oversaw Massachusetts health reform and is therefore as close as we have to a true veteran of a dramatic insurance overhaul, told the New Yorker, it’s only a small percentage (3 percent, to be precise) of Americans who you can really argue might at least potentially get screwed.

About 80 percent of people, those who receive insurance through their employer or are already enrolled in a government program, won’t experience any change at all, Gruber said. (The Kaiser Family Foundation puts the number at 79 percent).

Another 14 percent are currently uninsured people who will now be able to get covered because of the Affordable Care Act, Gruber said. (Kaiser pegs it at 16 percent uninsured). How many of those actually get covered depends on a few variables — like whether Republicans states come around and expand Medicaid — but that’s the share that stands to gain.

So then you have 6 percent who might receive a cancelation [sp] letter (Kaiser says the individual market is 5 percent). Of those, Gruber argued, about half aren’t really going to see a change: They’ll technically enroll in a new plan, but it’ll be very similar to what they already had.

That leaves 3 percent who will have to buy significantly different plans, some of whom might have to pay more for them (at least before the law’s tax credits and other financial assistance kick in).

[…]

To be clear, nobody has done an analysis yet of what people who have received a cancelation notice are going to pay for coverage under the ACA. There’s just no way to do that. But we can take a pretty educated guess by looking at the breakdown of the health insurance market provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

People making less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level qualify for either tax credits or expanded Medicaid (which, to be clear, has to cover the same set of 10 benefits that private plans have to cover). According to Kaiser, about 60 percent people in the individual insurance market (more than 10 million) have an income within that range, which leaves the other 40 percent (about 4.4 million) who don’t and won’t qualify for help.

So mash this all up — it’s an imperfect science — and Gruber’s prediction that about 3 percent of Americans are actually at risk of ‘losing’ under Obamacare holds up pretty well.

“We have to as a society be able to accept that,” he told the New Yorker. “Don’t get me wrong, that’s a shame, but no law in the history of America makes everyone better off.”

Got it? Even if that 3% number is correct (and I’d bet $100 it’s not), those people don’t matter, are insignificant in the scheme of things. After all, sacrifices have to be made for the “common good”, right? Just like those people who have lost jobs, or have seen their hours reduced, their full time status reduced to part time, and/or pay cut as a result of companies having to make cost adjustments due to the regulations under Obamacare. They don’t count. As to the rest, well, there will be a “net benefit” to Obamacare, you see, because even though they are losing their current planthanks to Democrats who voted against a GOP resolution in 2010 that would have prevented that from happening, they’ll have “better” options under a “new” plan … except the dum dums at TPM and other liberal outlets parroting this tripe don’t get that for many, comparable plans are too expensive for them and they will NOT qualify for a subsidy.

The “defenses” from liberals over the fresh media reports about how many people are losing their current insurance coverage over Obamacare are getting more pathetic by the minute, including another emerging tactic: trying to “debunk” Obamacare horror stories:

Since insurers have begun informing beneficiaries that their health care plans do not meet the new federal requirements of Obamacare, and will be either cancelled or significantly altered, the media has profiled countless middle class Americans who claim that the new health care law will force them to pay more for coverage.

Deborah Cavallaro, for instance, a real estate agent from Los Angeles, was enrolled in an individual plan that cost her just $293 per month. Under Obamacare, Cavallaro says she’ll have to pay over $400 for coverage she doesn’t need or want. But a higher premium doesn’t tell the whole story: while Cavallaro may spend more each month, she’ll be buying more comprehensive insurance with fewer out-of-pocket costs, better benefits that will cover more and cost her less if she actually falls ill, and much more robust consumer protections.

Assuming all of the above written by Think Progress is true (it probably isn’t), just shut up, Ms. Cavallaro, and accept that this “change” in your insurance policy “is for your own good.” Umkay?

: a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government

[…]

1:often capitalized: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

2: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control <early instances of army fascism and brutality — J. W. Aldridge>

Some liberals try to distance themselves from the word fascist by falsely asserting that fascism is primarily a “right wing” thing. Clueless wonders. As a Twitter friend notes:

@sistertoldjah Fascism is defined more in how an ideology is enforced on a populace, not necessarily the ideology itself.

Explaining fascism to people who don’t follow politics much is sometimes tricky and difficult. In the case of Obamacare, the arguments against centralized government making your decisions for you pretty much write themselves. End of story. It’s time for people to wake-up. Today.

There are Useful Idiots, fools, and then there are absolute tools -and “progressive activist” Sally Kohn manages to roll all three into one with this apologetic, lecture-y piece on Obamacare:

(CNN) — Conservatives are expressing shock and outrage that the Obama administration knew that many people in the individual insurance market would not be able to keep their plans once the Affordable Care Act took effect. Such shock is not surprising; overblown outrage is the stock and trade of conservative politics these days.

But here’s what conservatives won’t tell you, lest it undermine their theatrics: Many insurance plans are shutting down because they don’t meet the higher bar of quality benefits required under Obamacare, and of those people who lose access to their plans, many will pay less and all will have better and more comprehensive options.

Also, with a few exceptions, no one is really noting that this point isn’t quite news. In 2010, the fact that certain insurance plans would not be grandfathered into Obamacare because of their inadequate coveragewas widely coveredby the press. It was a given, after all that, if standards for health insurance were going to be raised in America — a good thing — then some plans that don’t meet the bar would no longer be available. One could blame this on the Affordable Care Act, or alternatively, one could blame this on insurance companies for providing such substandard care in the first place.

Here’s what this boils down to:

Will some people lose their current insurance? Yes.

Will these same folks lose health insurance coverage? No.

They will all have access to better plans and in many cases pay less because of expanded options and tax credits.

And many will have a LESSER plan and WON’T be able to afford anywhere close to the plan similar to the one they LIKED because they don’t qualify for those “expanded options” and “tax credits”, Ms. Kohn. What happened to FREEDOM OF CHOICE? What if someone LIKED their plan and wanted to STAY on their current plan – which suited THEIR needs just fine? What if you’re in the middle of a healthcare issue right now, pregnant, or maybe going through cancer treatments, and end up having to switch off to another plan midstream and can’t keep the doctor/care team you liked?

None of this matters to Ms. Kohn, and other Obama apologists like her, who are – in a nutshell – saying “who cares that MILLIONS will be dropped from the plans they’re on, and who gives a RIP that Team Obama KNEW this early on (as did the mainstream media) and still flatly and falsely asserted otherwise anyway? Barry O and his crew on Pennsylvania Avenue have declared that this is a better option for you, so just deal with it and shut up, ya rube!”

Welcome to modern day “liberalism”, folks, where thinking for yourself is secondary to being ‘patriotic’ enough to eagerly want to pay higher taxes, fork out more money for a healthcare plan you don’t like, and pledge blind allegiance to Uncle Sam – as long as he (or she) happens to be a far left Democrat.

Yesterday, I wrote about the European Union proposal to mandate speed governors on all cars, which would be automated to force a driver to slow down, should he exceed the legal speed limit. As an aside, I mentioned the trend toward driverless cars and the potential for state control of those. (And hacking, let’s be honest. But that’s another issue.)

Jonah Goldberg thought along the same lines this morning and imagined some of the “fun” we could have:

Let’s be fair: The experts aren’t always wrong, and even when they’re wrong, their arguments aren’t necessarily unreasonable given their assumptions. But if you follow the logic of mandatory seatbelts and motorcycle helmets, red-light cameras and anti-texting laws (1) to their natural conclusion, it’s easy to imagine that some bureaucrats will want to co-author your car’s software.

And then what? Will you ever be allowed to go over the speed limit again? Police are already drooling to see our GPS data. Will that become automatic too? Will the cops have the power to tell your car to stop whether you want it to or not? Will authorities be able to tell your car to take a detour to alleviate traffic? Make it turn around when it gets too close to certain off-limit areas?

Whoever thought that driving your own car could be the next “live free or die” moment?

Footnote:
(1) I am, however, strongly in favor of laws against cell phone use and texting while driving, having nearly been run down several times by people paying more attention to their phone than to the road. Studies show phoning while driving is as impairing as driving while drunk. And texting isn’t much better.

The world’s biggest nanny-state has decided that too many people are dying on Europe’s highways. Rather than leave that problem up to the member nations, the Euro-mandarins in Brussels have proposed to put speed-limiters, some of them satellite-controlled, on all cars. Go too fast, and Nanny puts on the brakes:

Under the proposals new cars would be fitted with cameras that could read road speed limit signs and automatically apply the brakes when this is exceeded.

Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Secretary, is said to be opposed to the plans, which could also mean existing cars are sent to garages to be fitted with the speed limiters, preventing them from going over 70mph.

The new measures have been announced by the European Commission’s Mobility and Transport Department as a measure to reduce the 30,000 people who die on the roads in Europe every year.

A Government source told the Mail on Sunday Mr McLoughlin had instructed officials to block the move because they ‘violated’ motorists’ freedom. They said: “This has Big Brother written all over it and is exactly the sort of thing that gets people’s backs up about Brussels.

“The Commission wanted his views ahead of plans to publish the proposals this autumn. He made it very clear what those views were.”

I’d like to think the minister illustrated his point with the traditional English two-finger salute. And this should be really popular in Germany, where the “need for speed” on the autobahns is a well-known national trait. So, what’s next? EU directives on how one shall cut one’s steak, with a minder showing up to measure each piece with calipers to make sure it isn’t too large?

This is another illustration of the control-freak nature of the Left (1): it’s not enough to set speed limits and levy fines for violating them, nor even to suspend driving privileges for repeat violations. Nope, they have to stand over you constantly lest you pass the bounds of what they determine to be proper. Go too fast, and Nanny will make you slow down.

Democrats in Washington and Sacramento must be green with envy.

Afterthought: Speaking of which, driverless cars are on the way. Who needs speed limiters when bureaucrats can control the whole vehicle? (2)

Footnotes:
(1) The whole European Union government is a statist paradise. The small-government, liberty-of-the-individual politician is a rare sight.
(2) Please. It’s only a matter of time before some progressive genius decides driverless vehicles should have Internet-based governors on them. For your own good, of course.

RELATED: Dan Mitchell make this part of his question of the week – “What’s More Worrisome, Big Brother Monitoring Where You Drive or Big Brother Controlling How You Drive?”

Via the UK Telegraph comes a report that France’s Socialist government, famous for burdening their “rich” with extraordinarily high taxs, have come to the conclusion that they can’t tax their people (the rich and middle class) anymore without bleeding them dry (via Memeorandum) :

France’s Socialist government has admitted that the country cannot cope with any further tax rises and promised no more hikes just days ahead of the country’s largest ever tax bill.

In an unfortunate piece of timing, however, the pledge came just as the environment minister announced the creation of a new “carbon tax” and amid reports that the overall tax pressure on French households will rise even further next year.

Returning from their summer break, the French are about to discover stinging rises in tax bills in their letter boxes – the result of a series of new levies enacted by President François Hollande as he seeks to plug the French deficit and bring down public debt – now riding at 92 per cent of GDP.

But the extent of the hikes has apparently even shocked the very Socialist ministers who implemented them.

The total tax pressure (taxes and social security contributions) will account for 46.3 per cent of GDP this year – a historic high – compared to 45 per cent in 2012.

Some 16 million households will see an automatic 2 per cent rise in income tax as calculations are no longer mitigated by inflation. Family tax breaks will be cut.

The rich will see the highest rises, following Mr Hollande’s decision to raise the rate to 45 per cent for those earning more than 150,000 euros – effectively 49 per cent due to an additional levy.

Amid discontent at the forthcoming rises, Jean-François Copé, head of the opposition Right-wing UMP party today pledged to enact “massive tax cuts” and to slash state spending by ten per cent should his party win power in 2017.

In a clear damage limitation exercise, a chorus of top Socialists spoke out against any more rises.

Pierre Mosovici, the finance minister, told France Inter radio: “I’m very sensitive to the French getting fed up with taxes We are listening to them.” Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister followed suit, warning Mr Hollande to be “very, very careful” as “there’s a level above which we shouldn’t climb”.

One Socialist told Les Echos newspaper that the hand-wringing was totally hypocritical as “they are crying wolf, but the wolf is us.”

The topic was top of the agenda at the Socialists’ annual “summer university”, which opened today , and where Ségolène Royal, Mr Hollande’s former partner, called for a “moratorium on new taxes.” Even more categorical was Bruno Le Roux, Socialist leader in the National Assembly, who declared: “There will be no new taxes” for the rest of Mr Hollande’s five-year mandate.

I’d like to think Socialists somewhere (in this case, France) have finally had their wake up call on how high taxes stifle growth by cutting off job creators and potential workers at the knees, but we know they haven’t. As PJ Tatler’s Rick Moran notes:

Jeez, what a bunch of hypocrites. They stick it to the people least able to absorb a tax hike without a decline in their standard of living, and then declare a de facto moratorium on tax hikes — at least until they think they can get away with more tax increases politically.

The net result of the tax increases will be slower growth, which, considering all the new spending that Hollande has proposed probably means the deficit will go up, rather than shrink. The French president was one of the biggest boosters in Europe of getting rid of “austerity” budgets, so now we’ll see just how “Hollandonomics” plays out in the real economy.

Detroit filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history Thursday after steep population and tax base declines sent it tumbling toward insolvency.

The filing by a state-appointed emergency manager means that if the bankruptcy filing is approved, city assets could be liquidated to satisfy demands for payment.

Kevin Orr, a bankruptcy expert, was hired by the state in March to lead Detroit out of a fiscal free-fall, and made the filing Thursday in federal bankruptcy court.

“Only one feasible path offers a way out,” Gov. Rick Snyder said in a letter to Orr and state Treasurer Andy Dillon approving the bankruptcy. The letter was attached to the bankruptcy filing.

“The citizens of Detroit need and deserve a clear road out of the cycle of ever-decreasing services,” Snyder wrote. “The city’s creditors, as well as its many dedicated public servants, deserve to know what promises the city can and will keep. The only way to do those things is to radically restructure the city and allow it to reinvent itself without the burden of impossible obligations.”

Snyder had determined earlier this year that Detroit was in a financial emergency and without a plan to improve things. Snyder hired Orr in March, and he released a plan to restructure the city’s debt and obligations that would leave many creditors with much less than they are owed.

Sadly, Detroit isn’t the only liberal city run into the ground by Democrats that faces this situation. Baltimore may be next. From a February Huffington Post piece:

WASHINGTON — The Baltimore city government is on a path to financial ruin and must enact major reforms to stave off bankruptcy, according to a 10-year forecast the city commissioned from an outside firm.

The forecast, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its release to the public and the City Council on Wednesday, shows that the city will accumulate $745 million in budget deficits over the next decade because of a widening gap between projected revenues and expenditures.

If the city’s infrastructure needs and its liability for retiree health care benefits are included, the total shortfall reaches $2 billion over 10 years, the report found. Baltimore’s annual operating budget is $2.2 billion.

The report was prepared by Philadelphia-based Public Financial Management Inc., a consulting firm that has prepared similar forecasts for Miami, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the District of Columbia. Baltimore’s decision to commission the forecast differs from those cities because each of them had already ceded financial oversight to the state, or in the district’s case, the federal government.

The forecast will provide the basis for financial reforms that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake plans to propose next week. The city has dealt with budget deficits for the past several years, closing a $121 million gap in 2010. But those deficits have been addressed with one-time fixes that haven’t addressed the long-term structural imbalance.

“When you have budget after budget and you know that there are systemic problems, I felt an obligation to do more than what we have done in the past,” Rawlings-Blake told the AP. The forecast, she said, shows that the city needs to address its financial woes “before it’s too late, and somebody is coming in and making these choices for us.”

That’s what happened to the District of Columbia, 38 miles to the south, in 1995 after the city reported a budget deficit of $700 million. Congress created a financial control board that instituted tight spending controls and ultimately took over all hiring and firing in nine city agencies. The spending cuts, combined with a robust regional and national economy, drove the nation’s capital back into the black.

Are y’all detecting the same pattern I am?

They said if I voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, that Detroit would end up having to file bankruptcy. And they were right.

How many failures can you spot in this picture?
(Photo via MarketWatch)

And yet the bureaucracy wonders why we laugh and point at them. Magician Marty Hahne received a letter from the US Department of Agriculture ordering him to submit a disaster plan for the rabbit he uses in his act:

My USDA rabbit license requirement has taken another ridiculous twist. I just received an 8 page letter from the USDA, telling me that by July 29 I need to have in place a written disaster plan, detailing all the steps I would take to help get my rabbit through a disaster, such as a tornado, fire, flood, etc. They not only want to know how I will protect my rabbit during a disaster, but also what I will do after the disaster, to make sure my rabbit gets cared for properly. I am not kidding–before the end of July I need to have this written rabbit disaster plan in place, or I am breaking the law.

Oh, he also has to prove he’s received training in how to implement Operation Save The Bunny.

Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage.

Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country. They cover minimal requirements such as preventive services, but often little more. Some of the plans wouldn’t cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital visit.

Federal officials say this type of plan, in concept, would appear to qualify as acceptable minimum coverage under the law, and let most employers avoid an across-the-workforce $2,000-per-worker penalty for firms that offer nothing. Employers could still face other penalties they anticipate would be far less costly.

It is unclear how many employers will adopt the strategy, but a handful of companies have signed on and an industry is sprouting around the tactic. More than a dozen brokers and benefit-administrators in 10 states said they were discussing the strategy with their clients.

“There had to be a way out” of the penalty for employers with low-wage workers, said Todd Dorton, a consultant and broker for Gallagher Benefit Services Inc., a unit of Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., who has enrolled several employers in the limited plans.

Pan-American Life Insurance Group Inc. has promoted a package including bare-bones plans, according to brokers in California, Kansas and other states and company documents. Carlo Mulvenna, an executive at New Orleans-based Pan-American, confirmed the firm is developing these types of products, and said it would adjust them as regulators clarify the law.

The idea that such plans would be allowable under the law has emerged only recently. Some benefits advisers still feel they could face regulatory uncertainty. The law requires employers with 50 or more workers to offer coverage to their workers or pay a penalty. Many employers and benefits experts have understood the rules to require robust insurance, covering a list of “essential” benefits such as mental-health services and a high percentage of workers’ overall costs. Many employers, particularly in low-wage industries, worry about whether they—or their workers—can afford it.

But a close reading of the rules makes it clear that those mandates affect only plans sponsored by insurers that are sold to small businesses and individuals, federal officials confirm. That affects only about 30 million of the more than 160 million people with private insurance, including 19 million people covered by employers, according to a Citigroup Inc. report. Larger employers, generally with more than 50 workers, need cover only preventive services, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty.

What.a.surprise. Not. Hate to say “Toldjah So” but in this instance its well-worth reminding people. Heck, most of us “Toldjah So” with respect to this law long before it passed via lots of strong-arming and the backroom arm twisting and political promises that candidate Obama, when first running for the highest office in the land, told us he couldn’t stand – tactics he would seek to “change.” Riiiight.

All that glitters is not gold and, in fact, you didn’t even have to read the fine print in the “Affordable Care Act” to figure out what a monstrous, disastrous, unhealthy law this was for our nation and its people. Hours are being cut, full time employee status types are changing to part time, jobs are being lost, employer plan coverages all across the country are changing to either being unaffordable or worthless to the average workaday Jane and Joe, and no in many instances people have NOT been able to KEEP THEIR PRIMARY CARE PHYSICIANS as a result of the passage of this law – one of the biggest whoppers told about this bill early on by its proponents. Employer health plan offerings as we know them are changing – and not for the better. This is, of course, in keeping with our President and his party’s ultimate goal: single payer health care coverage.

You got what you asked for, 51%. Too bad the rest of us have to suffer long-term for your woefully ill-informed decision to not only vote our celebrity President in the first time, but also for being clueless enough to turn around and do it again.

Instructions for making The Liberator, a plastic handgun that could escape detection by conventional airport security, were today made freely available to download from the internet by anti-government activists in the US.

It was created by a group in Texas that aims to make “WikiWeapons” that can be reproduced with a home computer and a $1,000 (£644) 3D printer that uses heated plastics instead of ink.

“It’s a demonstration that technology will allow access to things that governments would otherwise say that you shouldn’t have access to,” Cody Wilson, the leader of Defense Distributed, told The Daily Telegraph.

The Liberator may look like a toy, but “this gun can fire regular bullets,” Schumer said, calling for legislation outlawing the technology’s weapons potential.

The bill was drafted by Rep. Steve Israel (D-L.I.).

“Security checkpoints, background checks and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print their own plastic firearms at home and bring those firearms through metal detectors with no one the wiser,” Israel said in a statement.

To Schumer, the ramifications of make-your-own untraceable and undetectable weapons are “stomach-churning.”

“Now anyone, a terrorist, someone who is mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon, can essentially open a gun factory in their garage,” Schumer said. “It must be stopped.”

Apparently Chuck (and Rep. Israel) have never heard of improvised firearms, before, such as the Sten gun, meant to be made in home workshops. And Loyalist militias in Northern Ireland practically made a hobby out of homemade submachine guns. (So did the I.R.A., from what I’m told.)

But it’s not what the terrorist or criminal might do with the weapon that truly scares progressives, though I doubt even Schumer realizes this. Look again at the bolded quote above — Wilson nails it. What truly scares the progressive statist is the loss of control. The ideal, for Schumer and those like him, is the administrative state run by bureaucratic experts who decide what’s best for everyone. Life is too complicated for the “average Joe,” so we need ever more legislation and regulation to keep everyone safe and prosperous in line. That includes access to firearms, which have advanced beyond anything the writers of that dear, but now obsolete Constitution could imagine.

What frightens them is that it makes their precious regulations powerless. Like I wrote before on this issue:

But now think about the effect on gun control: this (3D priting) is the discontinuous innovation. Statists and gun-banners and those standing on the graves of children can scream as loud as they want for ever more laws controlling firearms, maybe even get them, but, as long as you can download the plans and have access to a printer… All those laws are useless. They’re the modern buggy-whips.

An idea once conceived cannot be un-thought, and technology once discovered cannot be undiscovered. Even the secret of making an atomic bomb is out there, in spite of all our efforts to keep it classified; only the difficulty of obtaining the materials and constructing it have slowed its spread.

But combine 3D printers (which are only going to get smaller, cheaper, and more portable) with easy information distribution — hello, torrent sites! — and, well, Schumer and his wise, progressive control-freak buddies can write all the laws and regulations they want; it just won’t do any good. People will ignore them.

And that’s what scares the pants off progressives.

PS: I can see one potentially big benefit to the advent of 3D firearms: by showing how useless gun-control regulations are, it might actually spur us to deal with the real problem behind mass shootings, such as at Aurora and Newtown — mental illness and the lousy state of mental health care in the US.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was denied a second slice of pizza today at an Italian eatery in Brooklyn.

The owners of Collegno’s Pizzeria say they refused to serve him more than one piece to protest Bloomberg’s proposed soda ban,which would limit the portions of soda sold in the city.

Bloomberg was having an informal working lunch with city comptroller John Liu at the time and was enraged by the embarrassing prohibition. The owners would not relent, however, and the pair were forced to decamp to another restaurant to finish their meal.

Witnesses say the situation unfolded when as the two were looking over budget documents, they realized they needed more food than originally ordered.

“Hey, could I get another pepperoni over here?” Bloomberg asked owner Antonio Benito.